Sessions at Ampersand 2011 on Friday 17th June

Vincent explains why he created Comic Sans and why it’s what design is all about. While working at Microsoft he created ‘web fonts’ for the first Internet Explorer. He will discuss the goals and challenges in creating these fonts and creating fonts for user interfaces and small devices like e-books and mobile phones. Hinting, font technology and screen rendering will be discussed. Now that modern devices are rendering very high resolutions is hinting no longer necessary?

Achieving a thorough grasp of typography can take a lifetime, but moving beyond the basics is within your reach right now. In this talk, we’ll learn how to look at typefaces with a discerning eye, different approaches to typographic planning, how typography impacts the act of reading, and how to choose and combine appropriate typefaces from an aesthetic and technical point of view. Through an understanding of our design tools and how they relate to the web as a medium, we can empower ourselves to use type in meaningful and powerful ways.

Web fonts are causing designers to approach typography in a whole new way. Services like Fontdeck are fundamentally changing the way designers choose type. Jon will explore this brave new world of web typography, and explain how the constraints of web type are actually an opportunity to refine how we design, from the body up.

More than twenty years ago, Jonathan Hoefler made it his mission to promote desktop publishing (and shush its critics) by providing designers with a new generation of fonts: attractive and useful designs which set a new standard in quality and dependability, and are today known as the H&FJ library. Today, as webfonts are buoyed by a wave of early-adopter enthusiasm, they’re marred by a similar unevenness in quality, and it’s not just a matter of browsers and rasterizers, or the eternal shortage of good fonts and preponderance of bad ones. There are compelling questions about what it means to be fitted to the technology, how foundries can offer designers an expressive medium (and readers a rich one), and what it means for typography to be visually, mechanically, and culturally appropriate to the web.

Join Jonathan Hoefler on an exploration of this side of webfonts, and a discussion of where the needs of designers meet the needs of readers. You’ll get a glimpse of what H&FJ has in store, and see why they believe that webfonts promise so much more than just ‘fonts on the web.’

The presentation will entertain and educate the audience through three non-technical quests; the design of serif fonts that work for small uses on the web, the taking back of ALL CAPS from the realm of shouting, and designing amidst the perils of internationalism.

The first third of the presentation is looking for clues in the basic nuts and bolts of type for small sizes, and type for few pixels, the two converging issues on letterdrawing for crude text.

The second third, is seeking the range of contrast and emotion that caps alone can bring, from the most vacant and impersonal sans monospaced to the most elaborate, even cheery, in crude media.

Finally, a brief history of designing 96 character, Latin-1, Central European, Greek, Cyrillic and beyond, for crude media – as experienced, and told to me by others.

This talk will focus on efforts to improve typographic support in CSS. Beyond just defining the @font-face rule, new properties in the CSS3 Fonts module provide explicit control over kerning, ligatures, small-caps and a variety of features commonly available in OpenType fonts.

These features will allow designers to solve a number of basic typographic problems in a much more elegant way than previously was possible. How these new properties evolved and some of the design problems involved will be discussed in detail. The problem of consistent rendering across browsers and the effect of that on both font and web design will also be discussed.

Why do we make the specific typesetting decisions we make? Does it matter what our reasons are? Have we considered everything? Should we do more research? What should we study? Is our typographic sensitivity sharp enough? Is it appropriate to improvise? How can we make the best use of our time?

In this talk Tim will share his answers to these questions and, most of all, his thoughts on how those answers inform practical decisions. Fulfilling our potential as typographers is a matter of challenging ourselves, channeling our influences, curating wisdom, and practicing in meaningful ways.

Laying out content has changed little over the centuries. It’s improved through the application of technology, but the design decisions and motivations remain the same. Until now. Designing with type for the web is changing, and it’s happening right now. Hundreds of years of design practice is being increasingly challenged, and for those of us working in this medium, it’s hurting. Mark will look at the scale of this problem and how we can change the way we work to embrace it.